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Defence in the UK

I am pleased for my hon. Friends the Members for North Durham (Mr. Jones), and for Grantham and Stamford (Mr. Davies), who have joined the ministerial team, and I wish them every success in their endeavours. In our previous defence debate, I spoke in glowing terms about the glorious day on which we held a joint ceremony in Stafford to mark the granting of the freedom of the borough to the 22 Signal Regiment and the Tactical Supply Wing. Today, contingents from both are deployed in Afghanistan. The residents of Stafford and I hold all those soldiers in our thoughts and wish them the safest of returns home at the end of their tours. The mayor of Stafford, the local newspaper and I are in the middle of an appeal; we set ourselves the target of ensuring that the public donates at least one care package to each and every one of those soldiers while they are away from us, to show that we are thinking of them and working for them, even though they are not with us. In the previous defence debate, I spoke about Operation Borona, which was mentioned recently, and the possibility of bringing up to 20,000 of our service personnel and their families home from Germany and basing them in this country. Over the next five years, it will be quite a job for us to find places to put those service personnel and their families, and to accommodate them comfortably. My short contribution to this debate will be about that task. Where shall we put them, how shall we accommodate them, and where will the money for the accommodation come from? As Members have said, the previous Conservative Government gave us one lesson: they showed us how not to arrange accommodation for our military personnel. As others have said, the Annington Homes deal was disastrous. I would like to add one more point to the criticisms made of the deal: the capital receipts of £1.6 billion were not reinvested in the Ministry of Defence, to be spent for military purposes; they went straight to the Treasury. We must be much smarter in future to ensure that when we dispose of surplus assets in our military, we reinvest the money in our military and do not hand it over to the Treasury for other purposes. I point out to Defence Ministers that when they argue those points with Treasury Ministers, I will be on their side. There are numerous ways in which we provide accommodation for our military personnel. The most obvious way is through direct provision by the Ministry of Defence. Project Slam is an example of that; it involves us paying either to renovate an unacceptable property or to build brand-new properties—single living accommodation—for military personnel. That direct provision will eat up about £5 billion of public resources over the next decade. Clearly, that is not enough to meet existing needs, never mind the needs of the extra personnel coming back from Germany, so we need to be smarter. There are private finance initiative contracts, and what we call prime contracts. They are an example of the Ministry of Defence taking that smarter approach. We need to look at the lessons to be learned from existing PFI contracts and prime contracts to see what more we can do along those lines. There are also schemes to enable and assist military personnel to buy their own homes. As for service personnel leaving the forces who hope to rely on social housing for their future accommodation, this year we at long last changed the law to ensure equality of treatment for service personnel and local residents in the places to which service personnel retire, in terms of local connection. That is very welcome. Once the Ministry of Defence has built or renovated a property, it must manage it efficiently. The two recent Select Committee reports on the subject, produced in 2007 and 2008, show that the Ministry has made a deplorable lack of progress as a manager of property, both in terms of successfully maintaining properties and carrying out repairs at the request of families and military personnel, and in terms of managing voids. Perhaps the new Ministers in the Department might wield a new brush and either sharpen up the Ministry's act, or take away its responsibility for the management of property. The question of where the military personnel from Germany should go brings us to an issue that has been mentioned at least twice in this debate: the future of super-garrisons. It was suggested in the last defence debate that the west midlands was a potential site for a super-garrison. As a west midlands Member of Parliament, I welcome that. Although the hon. Member for Canterbury (Mr. Brazier) seemed to suggest that a super-garrison would be a new base in the middle of nowhere, it could be a combination of estates and could be added to existing places. I welcome the idea of Stafford being part of the home of a west midlands super-garrison. We said earlier that we must be smart about contracts and the involvement of private partners in providing accommodation. How we raise money from assets and reinvest it in our estates leads me to suggest that, at Stafford at present, there may be opportunities for those things to be brought together. Stafford borough council, the local authority, is consulting on the local development framework for the area, so it will identify areas of land in Stafford for particular kinds of development; the Ministry of Defence, of course, owns a considerable amount of land in Stafford. It is certainly of interest to the Ministry how its land there is to be treated for planning purposes in future. I sincerely believe that with the right discussions, land owned by the Ministry of Defence in Stafford can be released for redevelopment and have permission for the most valuable kind of development, and therefore release the greatest capital receipts for the Ministry of Defence. If we then overcome the objections of the Treasury and are able to keep the money in Stafford, we will be able to build the accommodation, as part of a super-garrison, to house the people who come home from Germany with their families. I hope that that is a neat enough trick for the Ministers to want to thank me for my contribution to this debate.